As those skilled in the art will appreciate, the automatic creation and maintenance of coherent tracks from all radar detections substantially enhances the utility of such radar data. Moreover, the creation and maintenance of such tracks is essential to situational awareness and the data fusion process.
In some instances, there may be thousands of moving targets which must be monitored at any given time. Thus, radar information must be filtered before meaningful information can be provided thereby. Proper filtering of the radar data is necessary in order to provide a correct interpretation of the order of battle.
According to contemporary methodology, such radar filtering is performed by a tracking function. The tracking function generates and maintains a track for each desired target. Ideally, the tracking function prevents nearby targets, such as those on intersecting courses, from being confused with one another. The tracking function also mitigates clutter. Clutter is the presence of undesirable radar signals, which are typically due to radar returns from unimportant objects such as weather, birds, turbulent bodies of water, etc.
Such filtering of radar information by the tracking function substantially enhances situational awareness, particularly by freeing an operator from having to perform a visual association of radar returns. Such visual association or radar returns may, indeed, be an impossible task, particularly in very dense, dynamic target scenarios.
Contemporary tracking systems are only capable of manually creating a few tracks, which are then maintained by a computer. The computer must deduce traffic patterns from remaining radar returns, thus introducing an undesirable time delay. Those skilled in the art will appreciate that it is desirable to automatically generate tracked targets and to present radar operators therewith, so as to substantially enhance situation awareness by presenting useable data at a much faster rate. In this manner, automatic target tracking provides an overall picture of the monitored area, e.g., battle field, which assists in identifying the order of battle, as well as eventually preforming battle management.